Ervin, my feeling is that if every artist was an engineer then most of them would probably not be artists. I see the two talents pointing in different directions. Of course some engineers do appreciate appearances but only a few follow appearance to the detriment of functionality. That task is most often handled by marketing and cost reduction groups.

But sometimes it becomes quite clear that some engineers have no concept of what looks good and what does not, and unfortunately a few of them have been architects responsible for buildings that the rest of us have to see.

That FourJoy looked every bit as impractical as any of the concept cars shown. And it was not nearly sporty enough to be a fun sports type of vehicle. WHAt were they thinking?

The Dodge pickup would have sold a lot if they had put regular type doors on it, it looked much cooler than the El Camino. But Chrysler management of that era was often immume to creativity, except for my 1965 Barracuda. I loved that car. With a few modifications to the suspension it handled like a real race car.

Right - someone clearly thought "unnecessary ballast" was a clever turn of phrase, but that pesky "ballast" on any car is almost never considered unnecessary by the designers. The real indicator as to whether it's necessary or not would ultimately be determined by the marketplace.

@Jim S: To me the BMW looks like a death trap. I think it would lose in a collision with a Smart Car and that is saying something. On the cars I like the old Buick best, but what I really found facinating was the Big Hair on the two models with the 70 Mustang. It brought back uncomfortable memories of choking on my wife's hairspray before we left the house. I wonder how much lung damage is a remnant of that era.

Great show Charles. I agree with an earlier poster about all of the glass. That reminds me of an AMC Pacer. Yuchh.

The BMW concept seems to have technology that could be adapted to aircraft design. The shape changing capability could re-form a wing from a low drag high speed airfoil to a high drag low speed airfoil. The transition could be such that all intermediate combinations would allow an aircraft to operate in all flight regimes. This would allow the same aircraft to go from STOL to high speed flight, extending it's utility.

A few weeks ago, Ford Motor Co. quietly announced that it was rolling out a new wrinkle to the powerful safety feature called stability control, adding even more lifesaving potential to a technology that has already been very successful.

It won't be too much longer and hardware design, as we used to know it, will be remembered alongside the slide rule and the Karnaugh map. You will need to move beyond those familiar bits and bytes into the new world of software centric design.

People who want to take advantage of solar energy in their homes no longer need to install a bolt-on solar-panel system atop their houses -- they can integrate solar-energy-harvesting shingles directing into an existing or new roof instead.

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